Category: diary of a would be blogger
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Ah, the summer of love. From this long distance it seems an age of rosy innocence. Then the 1967 timeline recollects the startling reality. What a year it was! To a soundtrack of the Beatles, a newsfeed of race riots across the US, death dropped daily on Vietnam.

Somehow I just lost fifty years. Where did it go? One bank holiday Monday half a century ago – dear god half a century! – I slipped into a home-made kaftan and hopped onto the back of Glynn’s Lambretta. And off we roared (well, ok, scootered) into an echoing hall of fame. The rest is history, it seems. Continue reading

It’s such a gloriously improbable tale. A young woman on the last day of her holiday on Skye spots an old croft house for sale in an estate agents window. What happens next is the stuff of dreams at the end of a hard working week. Continue reading

The winter sun just hangs over the ridge of the Coolags. Its setting will seal the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice.

So wrote George Mackay Brown, the observant eye of the great Orkney poet seeking out the touch of magic conjured up by the Neolithic architects who created Maeshowe with hard-hewn rock and a knowing eye on the heavens. Continue reading

Bliss. Blogging in the sun, sitting outside with birds singing, bees humming, light breeze ruffling sea-shore sounds from the aspen leaves and only the distant hiss of hot tyres on the M90 across the fields reminding me that tiresome hustle and bustle goes on beyond Pond Cottage. Continue reading

Ah, the typewriter. I’m sitting, hands on laptop keyboard, staring at the screen but my mind’s eye looks back to an old Royal machine in a long-ago newsroom where I sit, fingers poised above firm round buttons, piles of screwed up copy paper on the floor, staring into the middle distance, waiting for words. Continue reading

This is the hat that I did not wear to meet the Queen. I did not wear any other hat and I did not meet the Queen. But I got near. As a would-be republican I have not been flaunting the invitation but yesterday Ray and I went to our first Royal Garden Party at Balmoral. Just us and 2000 others. Continue reading

Dear Diary (if I may call you that), I have been neglecting you badly over the last month or two. But I have not been idle.

During May I walked 104 miles during the Great British Walking Challenge. On the hypothetical journey from John O Groats to Lands End that would have taken me roughly as far as Alness. In fact many of the miles were up and down Leith Walk, helping to plan another Open Space event (Your Vision for Leith Walk?) that kept me from attending to my blog.

One of these days I will work out a way to write a blog that I can comfortably copy and paste across several websites (somehow it never feels quite right). But at least I did manage to make a connection between the Open Space event and the guest blog Ray wrote a year ago about the shameful state of Leith Walk.

And I also found a link between the Great British Walking Challenge organised by the charity Living Streets and my new day job on Walking Heads – we both want to get people out walking after all. At the end of the month I was very chuffed to discover Living Streets has quoted my Walking Heads blog posts in their newsletter and elsewhere also mention the fact that I lobbied my local MSP about their campaign for safer and smoother pavements. On my way up and down Leith Walk I could hardly fail to notice the state of the ground beneath my feet.

So in a way, Dear Diary, it has all made some kind of sense. But next month I hope to get back to spending some time with you. For once I need to stay in more.

Mad weather. I take my morning coffee out to join Beth basking in an upside down season. The other day I heard geese flying over, there are red leaves piled up on the ground and a robin sits on the wheelbarrow watching me watching him. All the signs of late September are staring me in the face but the thermometer says something quite different. Summer has finally arrived as nature dumps autumn on the back doorstep.

Proud parents have followed FOUND the band to all kinds of places. We missed the Small Isles Festival on Eigg but made it to T in the Park, and a container gig (no kidding) in a car park plus sundry clubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. We were away when Lauren Laverne played their new chocolate single on BBC 6. Still not kidding – we saw, heard and ate the proof at the Cupar bakery where the brilliantly bonkers confection was made. Just listen to this and marvel…

Just to show I don’t spend all my time photographing litter. Here’s my attempt at origami pelicans to hang on the Poetry Tree in the Poetry Garden in St Andrew Square. So, you don’t know about thePoetry Garden? More about that later – right now I better go and pack for the trip to Oslo tomorrow. The forecast says its warm and wet. But judging from the price of booze it will be pretty dry as far as we are concerned.